Exchange is an application that runs on a windows service and provides email. Hosted exchange is when a third party provides and supports the server that delivers email for your company. But what exactly are the benefits of hosted exchange services?
Email is one of the most valuable technical assets a company can have. Most office workers would say it is a simply invaluable tool for day to day business operations, and one that they cannot afford to be without for even the smallest amount of time.
However, email is never a cheap solution for a company, both in terms of physical hardware (servers/storage) and the people required to set up and keep the servers running. Log files fill up, database storage runs out, people have to worry about offline defrags, not to mention backups etc. It can turn into quite an expensive yet essential venture that can keep IT costs up.
With hosted exchange services another company takes the burden of providing and supporting an exchange server away from you. They often have a good spec server which is more than capable of meeting your exchange needs, as well as the engineers and support staff available to take pressure off your IT staff if things need reconfiguring. Users also get a sizeable mailbox, and everything is in the cloud so your company doesn’t need to dedicate resources to backing the server/mailboxes up. Pricing is usually a simple per user per month fee – vastly simplifying the usual Microsoft licencing confusions.
With hosted exchange you can lower your monthly expenditure on email related resources, as well as give your IT staff the peace of mind that their company’s oh so valuable emails are safe in the cloud, and that they don’t need exchange experts on site to keep things running.
